


no creature rarer than a natural-born sadist

by suitablyskippy



Category: Gintama
Genre: All-Out Cabaret Warfare, Competition, F/F, Rivalry, Undercover in a Hostess Bar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-03
Updated: 2016-09-10
Packaged: 2018-08-12 19:56:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7947067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitablyskippy/pseuds/suitablyskippy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Thanks <i>so</i> much for the advice,” says Sacchan. “What’s your biggest tip for pleasing customers, Otae-san? Beat them so hard they develop concussion and forget all about how awful your personality is?”</p><p>Tae breathes in – and compresses her fury, and stores it tidily away for future use – and breathes out. Then she smiles demurely at her. She’s very good at smiling demurely at people. She’s paid every night to smile demurely at people she’d rather leave stranded without survival gear on a mountainside in deepest midwinter. “If you have any more questions about the way we do things here, Sarutobi-san, please don’t hesitate to ask. I <i>always</i> like to help the new girls settle in.”</p><p>(Of all the cabaret clubs in all the towns in all the world, Sacchan walks into Tae’s. If she had any sense of self-preservation, she’d turn around and walk right out again.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It's the rarest of rarepairs, but Tae/Sacchan was my very first Gintama ship! Their never-ending spiteful feud has been filling my heart with joy ever since the moment Sacchan first decided it was necessary to declare Tae her rival for life, and found out what a ruthless enemy she'd made. HERE'S TO THE GOOD SHIP SARUTAE!!! ♥

 

Several hours deep into an unremarkably tedious Tuesday night of champagne and champagne and more champagne and noisy red-faced men growing ever noisier, ever more red-faced, loosening their ties and telling her noisily all about their unspeakably dreary marital problems while still not buying as much champagne for her as she’s quite sure their fat salaryman wallets could viably afford, Tae makes her sweet excuses and heads out for the staff’s backroom. 

Red carpet changes to scrubby grey; gold-striped wallpaper changes to plain white, and the electric lights shine in round yellowing lampshades instead of gleaming gilt sconces. She goes down the corridor and into the dressing room, and steps daintily over the crumpled heap of satin just inside the doorway – it’s a shame, really, but whoever’s kimono it is is surely well on her way to unemployment; any girl who’d treat her own clothes with such a slovenly lack of care simply isn’t the kind of girl who can expect to charm and win the affections of a dozen suitors every night. Natural beauty only takes a woman so far; no one coasts to success in this business. 

Kiyo and Saku are there, sitting before the long mirror above the dressing table; but Kiyo stops curling her eyelashes when Tae comes in, and Saku stops tucking pins into her hair, and though they greet her warmly enough, immediately afterwards they find each other’s eyes in their reflections with a look of effortfully subdued alarm. 

But effortfully subdued alarm is a look Tae is more than used to on her entrance anywhere, and she graciously lets it go unnoticed. 

“Would you mind if I opened the window, girls? It’s an awfully humid night tonight,” she says, and also graciously unnotices the way that both Kiyo and Saku are still too busy suppressing their alarm to respond in any way at all. “Personally, _I_ think we should be allowed to demand that customers deodorise themselves right there in front of us on nights as warm as this, just to be absolutely certain they’re as fit for human company as can be – though I suppose ‘fit for human company’ might be aiming our sights a little high, at least to start with. Perhaps ‘approachable without a gas mask and hazard suit’ would be a more realistic goal.”

“You tell her,” says Kiyo, and, “ _You_ tell her,” snaps Saku, “it was you said to tell her, so _you_ tell her,” to which Kiyo objects, “But it’s you who _saw_ it—”

Tae pushes open the window and turns to them. The sudden wash of fresh night air at her back is refreshing, compared to the damp, suffocating murk of the heat in the club itself, but that’s saying little: even drowning slowly in a mud swamp would be refreshing compared to the club itself on a busy summer night. “What is it you need to tell me, girls?” she inquires politely. 

Saku puts several of her hairpins between her teeth and hurriedly starts fixing her hair again, which leaves it to Kiyo. She sets down her eyelash curler and stares at her own half-made-up reflection with the look of a woman on her way to public execution. “Have you... seen the leaderboard tonight, Otae-chan?”

“Not since we opened,” says Tae. She looks at Kiyo’s reflection too, until Kiyo looks up and finds her eyes in the mirror. “Why? Should I?”

“I,” says Kiyo, and falters. “Maybe...? Or – maybe not. Um. But if you haven’t seen it—”

Tae runs herself a glass of water from the sink in the corner, and sips it till it’s done; and then she steps back over the crumpled heap of satin in the doorway, and she goes to the office. 

The leaderboard generally holds very little in the way of surprises. The night’s takings so far are marked up on a chart that grows taller with every passing hour, until at the closing of the club it’s there for all to see: _OTAE-CHAN_ in first place far more often than not, her line stretching higher up the chart than any other, Snack Smile’s cabaret girl supreme. And tonight there she is, as ever, rising up past Ane and Oryou and Kiyo, her little pale green line stretching up and up and up—

Tonight, there’s a new line. This one is lilac, and it’s labelled _BUNNY-CHAN_ , and it’s soared so far beyond Tae’s own that the very impossibility of its existence had prevented Tae from noticing it at once. 

Her heartbeat is calm. Her breathing is calm. She turns from the leaderboard and goes through into the manager’s room, and calmly says, “Boss? Who is this—” the name nearly sticks in her throat; she breathes calmly in, and calmly out, and calmly says, “—this... _Bunny-chan_?”

“Bunny-chan? Our new girl,” says her boss, who’s at his desk, working a toothpick industriously between some inaccessible molars. “A great girl, Bunny-chan. Great attitude. Great body. Great name, too. You’ll love her. A real money-maker. She might be new but she knows what she’s doing, you know what I mean? A great girl.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” says Tae. “She sounds like a delight.”

“A real delight,” her boss says fervently. He tosses the toothpick aside and misses the dustbin. “Haven’t you got customers of your own to be delighting, Otae-chan?”

Tae does. She certainly does. She bids her boss her warmest farewells and steps back out into the club, where the noise and the heat and the fug of sweat and alcohol and cigarette smoke burst damply open in her face like a uniquely disgusting raincloud. Her booth is on the far side, and she starts for it... but slowly, her eyes narrowed against the gloom, surveying the club with an intent, proprietorial focus. 

A crowd towards the front – at Ane’s booth, of course, playing up the humbly god-fearing shrine maiden act for all it’s worth, even as she drinks herself into roaring belligerence each night without even a fraction of Tae’s own natural humility – and less of a crowd by Hanako’s booth, though her customers are always loyal to her, at least; a little charm from a homely girl goes a long way, and so she usually picks up the men too pathetically intimidated to approach women of Tae’s own calibre – and the usual small, intimate groups for Fujiko and Tsuya and Aoko, and Kiyo’s booth sitting empty while she primps in the dressing room – and it looks as though Oryou has a party of some sort in tonight, which Tae can’t resent, because for all her kind nature she’s only rarely in the club’s top third of earners and consequently no threat whatsoever to Tae’s own rank – and Oryou catches Tae’s eye above the heads of the men around her, and happily returns her smile, and waves—

The woman at Kumi’s booth isn’t Kumi. The woman at Kumi’s booth can hardly be seen through the swarming, clamouring press of customers around her table, but Tae balls her fists and sweetens her smile and fights through towards that glimpse of lilac at the centre of the braying crowd. 

The woman at Kumi’s booth is blindfolded, and on her knees, with her hands cuffed behind her back and her face upturned to the streams of champagne splashing down partially into her open mouth but mostly down her face, and in her hair, and soaking her remarkably brief and frilly kimono through to the point of near-translucence. Someone uncorks a fresh bottle and upends it. The woman at Kumi’s booth puts her tongue out further and makes a hideous moaning sound that unlocks the already flimsy cage door of whatever monster it is that bides away its time in Tae’s nightmarish hind brain. 

She pushes nearer, and nearer still. With polite curiosity, she asks, “Bunny-chan?” 

Her new colleague turns her face blindly in Tae’s direction like an obscene flower seeking its obscene sun. “I’ll do private sessions,” she yells above the din, “or less private, if exhibitionist play in the heated sexual frenzy of a crowd environment is more what you—”

Tae seizes a handful of her champagne-sodden hair and yanks with all her strength until Sacchan stumbles, wailing, to her feet. “This way,” she says pleasantly, and shoves her on ahead of her through the crowd, hands still cuffed and eyes still blind, and through the club, and all the way back to the door to the staff’s backroom. 

“I don’t mind the violence,” begins Sacchan, as soon as she hears the door close behind them and the sounds of the club abruptly muffled, “or the manhandling, or the fierce, animalistic way your primal lusts led you to seize me from the centre of a howling mob that wouldn’t have rested until my innocent purity was theirs just so you could claim me as your own; but we do have to talk prices before we go any further, Master, so if you could briefly outline just a _little_ of whatever depravities you’ll be forcing me into, exactly—”

Tae rips off her blindfold. She attempts to rip it off, anyway – but beneath her fingers its black material feels uncomfortably slick, and unmoving; so she shoves Sacchan’s head forward and impatiently unbuckles the leather straps – and _then_ she rips off the blindfold, and throws it to the floor, and shoves Sacchan’s head back up so hard it smacks against the corridor wall. “ _What_ are you doing here?” she demands. 

Sacchan squints blearily against the sudden light. Champagne drips into her eyes, trickling from her sodden hair. “Gin-san?”

“Gin-san?” says Tae. “You think I look like Gin-san, do you? You think I look like a man, Sarutobi-san? Do you?”

“If you’d revealed yourself sooner I’d _never_ have mentioned prices, Gin-san,” says Sacchan fervently, “I only said that because I thought it was a lesser man who’d seized me, one who didn’t have the right to demand whatever he wants of me for free the way that _you_ do, Gin-san – because I had no idea it was the alpha of the pack who’d claimed me, you see, because all this champagne’s been running up my nose all night, Gin-san, so it blocked my ability to pick up your raw masculine scent the way I usually would – but _now_ I can,” she says, and breathes deep from Tae’s hair, and lets out a sound so utterly indecent and prolonged that Tae would remove Shinpachi’s internet privileges for life if she ever heard it coming from his bedroom speakers. 

She removes the glasses hooked into the low, scooping front of Sacchan’s kimono and slides them onto her, since Sacchan has no hands to do it herself, and says again: “ _What_ are you doing here?”

Sacchan blinks and looks at her. Her expression turns to distaste behind her glasses. “ _You_ ,” she says. There’s a clicking sound, and her handcuffs fall free; she drops them to the floor and rubs the stiffness from her wrists. “I’m a working woman, same as you are. What did you do with Gin-san?”

“Gin-san was never here, you delusional pervert,” says Tae. Her voice is sweeter than any parfait Gintoki’s ever eaten. “Tell me what you’re doing here, Sarutobi-san. Tell me right this instant, or I promise that what happens next will hurt so much that even _you_ won’t enjoy it.”

“ _Bunny-chan_ ,” snaps Sacchan. “My name is _Bunny-chan_ , and I’m here for work.” 

Tae balls a fist and raises it between them. Tsuya steps out from the dressing room at the end of the corridor, takes one look, and ducks hurriedly back inside. 

“For _work_ ,” Sacchan says again. “For... _work_.” Her eyes are wide behind her glasses, as though this should be significant to Tae. It isn’t. She makes a sound of disgust and ducks her head. “I’m here for _undercover_ work,” she hisses into Tae’s ear, alcohol on her breath but also soaked into her clothes and drying stickily in her hair, reeking of it as much as she reeks of overconfidence, sexual deviancy, and an embarrassingly desperate and insatiable need for attention at all costs. “For _ninja_ work. For _proper_ work. Because I earn my _real_ living at something other than selling myself to the whims of drunken grasping men who hunger for nothing but my tender feminine body laid out at their merciless mercy. Unlike some of us. Unlike _you_.”

Tae’s fists curl and uncurl. Her blood is pounding like a war drum. “I think you’re confusing me with Tsukuyo-san,” she says. Her voice has never been so friendly. “Or perhaps yourself, Bunny-chan. I’m a cabaret girl, you see. I’m a cabaret girl, and this is my cabaret. My territory, Bunny-chan. _Mine_.”

“What a coincidence!” says Sacchan, her voice soaring back to its previous deafening volume. “I’m an employee here too now, Otae-san! So I’m a cabaret girl too!” 

“Are you sure?” says Tae, with sweet concern. “Because you were acting awfully like a low-rent amateur hooker out there just now, Bunny-chan. I’d hate to think you got lost in Kabukichou on your way to Yoshiwara.” 

“Oh, no, I’m in the right place,” says Sacchan. Her voice is growing ever louder; her expression is turning uglier. “You see, I heard from a friend of mine that even the top earner at this club was some flat-chested sexless prude, and I thought to myself, well, if a woman like _that_ can make a living here, then _I_ certainly can. And I thought that once the men here saw what a real woman looks like, and acts like, and prostrates herself before them like, then that top earner wouldn’t be a top earner for much longer at all. And it looks like I was right, doesn’t it?”

Tae breathes in – and compresses her fury, and stores it tidily away for future use – and breathes out. “This is a cabaret club,” she says politely. “It’s not a brothel. We aren’t licensed for private shows, Bunny-chan, so stop selling them.” 

“Thanks _so_ much for the advice,” says Sacchan, as she stoops to pick up her handcuffs. “What’s your biggest tip for pleasing customers, Otae-san? Beat them so hard they develop concussion and forget all about how awful your personality is?”

Tae smiles demurely at her. She’s very good at smiling demurely at people. She’s paid every night to smile demurely at people she’d rather leave stranded without survival gear on a mountainside in deepest midwinter. “If you have any more questions about the way we do things here, Bunny-chan, please don’t hesitate to ask. I always like to help the new girls settle in.” 

She goes back into the club, and shuts the door behind her as demurely as she can. 

The force of the slam shakes the chandeliers on their golden ropes. Light swings wildly across the room; dust cascades from the ceiling rafters. The door cracks along its frame, splinters, and collapses to the dirty carpet in two jagged wooden halves. 

“Whoops,” says Tae, and when her manager bursts out from his office in horrified dismay, she smiles demurely at him as well. 

 

+++

 

By the close of the night, a lilac trail has climbed nearly all the way to the highest edge of the leaderboard. Languishing far behind, Tae’s own pale green line climbs up to nothing but a lowly second place. 

Tae looks up at the chart, saying nothing. Her smile is as pleasantly bland as though she’s only reading the forecast for a day of pleasantly bland weather – but around her the other girls crowded into the office edge back from her, and keep their distance from her, and elbow each other to be furthest from her. The low, electric scent of fear is thrilling in the air around her. Tae is too preoccupied to notice it. 

Their boss claps his hands, then rubs them together. He’s beaming, though no one else dares. “A great night, girls,” he announces. “Great work. Great profits. Too bad Kumi-chan’s off on her holidays, but I can already tell we’ve got a great new member in the team.”

“Oh, I couldn’t agree more,” says Tae. She turns from the leaderboard and casts her gentlest smile across the room. “She’s so new, but she’s worked so hard, and she’s done so well. To Bunny-chan, everyone!”

No one echoes it back to her. Tae says it again, just as brightly. A few reluctantly mumbled echoes come back to her. She says it again, and a few more mumbled echoes come back, and then Saku says, “Where _is_ Bunny-chan?”

Bunny-chan is out in the main room of the club, rolled awkwardly on one side with her hands once again cuffed behind her back, mostly hidden beneath her booth table and snoring contentedly in a puddle of stickily congealing champagne already drying deep into the carpet. Tae takes care to tread on her hair as she picks her way towards her through the mess, and grinds her heel down to be sure it’s fully embedded in the filth; and then she stirs her awake, and enquires in concern after her welfare, and offers her a gentle hand to stand with and a solicitous shoulder to lean on, and assures the girls of the club that she’ll be just fine walking poor Bunny-chan back home tonight – for Tae remembers her own first night at Snack Smile, and more than anything else she remembers how overwhelming all of it had seemed, so in truth she’s got nothing but sympathy for Bunny-chan, who’s worked her hardest and given her all, and surely needs only a good day’s sleep before she’s ready to adjust to the hours worked by any self-respecting cabaret girl...

Dawn is rising eerily in the streets of Kabukichou. Tae walks with Oryou and Tsuya as far as the crossroads by the 24/7 supermarket; she walks on with Oryou as far as the towering shrine gate that marks the official entrance to the district; and then she walks on alone, Sacchan sagging on her shoulder, all the way to the narrow wooden bridge that splits the wrong side of the river – the Kabukichou side – from the right side of the river – the Shimura side. 

“Sarutobi-san?” No answer. Tae raps her fist gently against Sacchan’s head. “Sarutobi-san, I don’t know where you live. Are you awake?” 

No answer. Then Sacchan yawns, and yawns again, which at least is proof that she’s conscious; and Tae steps a little nearer to the edge of the river and pushes her in. 

There’s a thud, and a wail, and then a heavy splash and some gurgling, some more splashing, some more gurgling. 

Tae peers over the river wall. The streetlights are shining from the fast-flowing water in dazzling reflection, and she shades her eyes against it. “The current will take you where you need to go,” she calls down. “Possibly. Or possibly not. It might just sweep you out to sea with the rest of this city’s filthy sewage waste.” 

Amidst the gurgling and the splashing comes another noise. It sounds like Sacchan intends the noise to be words, but what with all the gurgling, and all the splashing, it’s really quite unintelligible. 

“Don’t come back,” Tae calls down politely. “Not if you know what’s good for you. Good night, Sarutobi-san.”

She crosses the bridge as Sacchan is swept away beneath it, and she goes home. 

 

+++

 

The next night, Sacchan gives up on even the pretence of kimono and arrives for work in a maid’s costume that Tae feels quite sure no maid with any sense would ever wear. Such brutal corseting seems impractical for getting down on hands and knees to scrub the inside of an oven, for starters; and such a quantity of latex seems like nothing but a health hazard for the strenuous task of scrubbing down great vats of dirty sheets in a sweltering hot laundry room. But Bunny-chan’s booth is busy all night, and business is booming all night, and all night the bottles roll in and in and in. 

And at the close of the night, the leaderboard says precisely what Tae doesn’t want it to. 

 

+++

 

The night after that, Sacchan arrives in the dressing room for her evening’s work wearing a gag and remarkably little else. 

“Goodness,” says Tae, as she glances up from brushing Hanako’s hair tidily into place – a lovely deep brown, though of course neither as lovely nor as deep as Tae’s own, and really quite lifeless without mousse, which certainly can’t be said of Tae’s. “If you don’t mind my asking, Bunny-chan, however do you expect to make conversation with your customers when you’re wearing that?” 

Sacchan’s expression blackens. She seizes Tae by the arm and drags her into the office, where she snatches paper from the desk and scrawls: _It’s not my CONVERSATION they’re interested in you uptight little virgin!!!!!_  
  
Half a dozen responses snap to her tongue, fast and cruel as the crack of a whip – but just behind Sacchan is this evening’s leaderboard, fresh and blank and ready for the club to open, with every girl’s name written along the bottom in her designated colour, and there at the very end is that unfamiliar dash of lilac: _BUNNY-CHAN_. It catches Tae’s eye, and fury surges up in her, and the immediate violent effort to force it back down is enough to leave a moment’s pause. 

A moment’s pause is all it takes for Sacchan to storm from the room. 

And one night’s work is all it takes to prove that Sacchan’s conversation really _isn’t_ what her customers are interested in. 

“First place _again_ , Bunny-chan!” their boss says jovially. “You other girls had better start watching your backs, eh?”

“You’re such a high-achiever, Bunny-chan,” says Tae, humbly admiring. 

“Mmrrf hrrmm _hrrf_ ,” says Sacchan, complacent even through the gag, and there’s no need to speculate about what would happen if looks could kill: Tae _herself_ would kill, bare-handed, right there and then, if it weren’t so tiresomely likely that the other cabaret girls crowded in around her would lose a little of their starry-eyed faith in her endlessly gentle nature. 

 

+++

 

Fridays are the busiest night of the Kabukichou week, and every girl in her right mind steps her game up a little more than usual when Fridays come around: her nicest kimono, her most elegant hairstyle, her most alluring perfume. Every girl at Snack Smile _is_ in her right mind, except one. 

That Friday, Sacchan emerges from the dressing room in a homemade wig with such a close-cropped and tightly-curled silver perm that Tae feels a sudden, unsettling suspicion that perhaps Gintoki _hadn’t_ been making it all up for attention when he complained of waking up pube-free after his most recent rough night out. Sacchan heads out into the club with a long, manly stride, one arm of her blue-and-white yukata flapping free, shedding silver curls behind her as she goes. Beneath her arm is tucked a life-sized bodypillow. The bodypillow features an equally life-sized photograph of Sacchan, the last few microscopic scraps of her modesty preserved by some crumpled red bedsheets and very little else. 

“Bunny-chan’s lucky that thing hasn’t been censored,” observes Tae, watching from the safe distance of Oryou’s booth. She taps a finger thoughtfully against the rim of her champagne flute. “Do you think I should call Shin-chan to come down here? I’m sure the broadcasting corporation would never let her get away with it if there were an innocent child in the same scene. Perhaps that’s the trick; perhaps she’s only getting away with this because we’re all of us grown adults here. Perhaps I should invite Kagura-chan as well.” 

“She said the pillow was for cuckolding play,” says Oryou doubtfully, watching from Tae’s side. “She said it’s a sort of... depraved erotic humiliation designed to stoke the primitive fires of men’s possessive lusts.”

Tae pours herself a second glass and downs half of it. “I’m sure she did,” she agrees. 

“She said men want to feel unwanted,” says Oryou. 

“Well, I’m sure Bunny-chan knows better than we do about feeling unwanted,” says Tae, and finishes the rest of her glass in one. 

No customer who’s ever crossed her path could say Tae’s sales tactics have ever been gentle, or subtle, or even technically legal, given the Shinsengumi’s tediously negative attitude towards acts of grievous bodily harm; but the hallmark of any truly successful businesswoman is the ability to constantly excel herself, no matter how astonishing her level of success might already be. No one reaches the top and stays there without the ability to get creative when necessary. 

And as such, an exhilarating new speed-based game involving one fresh-popped bottle of champagne per player and a stopwatch comes into existence at her booth that evening. Whenever a man throws back his head to drink more deeply Tae claps her hand down against the bottle’s end, joyfully encouraging, just to be sure as possible that he’s drinking as quickly as possible – for it’s difficult for a man to drink slowly with the neck of his bottle lodged immovably deep inside his gullet, and it’s difficult too for him to talk, which is just as well, because talking would only waste time which could be better spent on drinking. The prize for the winner is the privilege of buying the next round of bottles for the next round of players; the penalty for the loser is the indignity of buying an extra round of bottles for the next round of players; the only route to elimination is physical incapacity, which happens rather more frequently than Tae had truthfully been expecting. In most cases it’s difficult to tell whether the cause of the collapse is alcohol poisoning or champagne-flooded lungs or choking from a punctured throat, but Tae’s no doctor – she evicts the fallen into the humid summer night outside the club, and the game goes on. Grown men should know their own limits; it’s hardly fair to expect her to take responsibility for the bad decisions of others. 

And the leaderboard reflects her hard work that night. It really does. But...

In Tae’s experience, the natural order of things has a way of correcting itself. Perhaps there might be a temporary blip, every now and then, but ultimately those who deserve to succeed will succeed, and those who deserve to be confined to the sort of historical footnote that only says ‘ _hundreds were killed by a hideously disfiguring plague that swept the nation and left its victims cast out from society, forgotten, and eventually buried in unmarked mass graves_ ’ will experience whatever dire suffering best suits them: leadership of the Shinsengumi, for instance, or naturally curly hair. Nature has a way of asserting itself. 

The leaderboard reflects Tae’s hard work that night. It really does. But more than that – far, _far_ more than that – it reflects Bunny-chan’s shameless sluttishness. 

Ranking second to Sacchan is not the natural order of things. Ranking second to Sacchan is as far from the natural order of things as any nightmare could ever be. 

Perhaps nature _will_ reassert itself, given time – and perhaps the rightful and proper status quo _will_ settle back in place, given time... 

In the meantime, though, it seems to Tae like nature needs a little helping hand.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

Her exhilarating new drinking game is banned from Snack Smile after the clubs on either side start complaining about the near-constant wail of ambulance sirens in the street outside; but no one reaches Tae’s level of unimaginable success without the ability to make the most of all and any circumstances, and the setback doesn’t stop her for a moment. 

She shyly invites Gintoki to the club while blushing ever so prettily, and promises that, for every last male friend of his he brings with him, they’ll be bumped an extra level up the scale of honoured VIP treatment; but Gintoki arrives with a wanted terrorist, a homeless tramp, the dumpy little mechanic who lives down the road from him, and several robots dressed in ill-fitting tuxedos – which the four of them insist are fully human, and fully eager to participate in a night of drunken debauchery, and fully deserving of an extra bottle of free champagne each to split between the table. 

“Are you _quite_ sure they’re fully human?” says Tae. 

“You would question the humanity of my faithful friends? The humanity of my staunchest allies, loyal to me since the war? Good men, each and every one,” cries Katsura in his passion, and slings an arm around the shoulder of the nearest robot. “As human as you, Otae-dono, as human as myself or Gintoki or Elizabeth—”

“Fully human,” Gintoki assures her. 

Tae seizes the crotch of the nearest robot and squeezes, and squeezes, and squeezes. 

Hydraulics burst; scalding air puffs out; metal shatters in her hand. Cogs and gears spill out through her fingers and rain down rattling and clattering to the floor. 

“Well!” says Tae. She uses Gintoki’s loose sleeve to wipe her hand clean of oil stains. “For a fully human man, he seemed awfully unresponsive to a woman’s touch. Is that the typical reaction, Gin-san?”

Gintoki seems to be having some difficulty looking away from Tae’s hand. She opens it. She closes it. Black oil drips down her wrist. His expression is glassily unwell. “Have I ever felt a woman’s touch? Zura? Do you remember? I’m pretty sure I haven’t. I’m pretty sure you should ask someone who has. Hasegawa-san, you’re a married man – why don’t you tell Otae-san what she wants to hear?”

Behind his sunglasses, Hasegawa has turned an unappealing shade of milky vomit. “That’s,” he says, “I mean, not _me_ – which is to say, Otae-san, it’s been so long since – I mean, with how infrequently I get the chance to bathe these days, you can’t blame Hatsu-san for her complete lack of interest in sharing intimacy with a man as worthless as—”

“They’re robots,” says Tae. She takes the next robot by its shining silver metal throat, and squeezes. The steel crumples in her fist like an old tin can. “I asked Gin-san for men and he’s brought me robots. They’re not even good robots, Gengai-san. Well, I hope you’re all proud of yourselves – four old men teaming up to defraud one innocent, vulnerable young cabaret girl; and I hope you know the only way to make it up to me will involve champagne, and lots and lots and _lots_ of it—”

“ _Gin-san_!” shrieks Sacchan, and launches herself into Tae’s booth at such high speed that what few clothes she bothered to put on that night manage to flutter from her as she goes. Gintoki doesn’t dodge in time; she collides with him and his head slams back against the wall with a sound like colossal, irreversible neurological damage. His body falls limply sideways on the bench. With neither a moment’s pause nor a moment’s silence, Sacchan scrambles up on top of him. “I knew you’d come for your little Bunny-chan, just as your little Bunny-chan always, always, _always_ comes for you – but whatever are you doing _here_ , Gin-san? My booth’s all the way over the other side, and anyone with eyes can see Otae-san’s got nothing to offer a man of _your_ sophisticated tastes; or even a man of unsophisticated tastes, for that matter, or really any man at all – or even any living creature in the world, if we’re honest, excepting Kyuubei-san and the apes inside the city zoo—”

Gintoki fights his way back to consciousness. Consciousness greets him with a faceful of red leather bikini and deafening obscenities being shrieked directly into his ear. Gintoki appears to decide he preferred unconsciousness, and promptly collapses again. 

Sacchan clutches him to her and shakes his limp body as passionately as though she’s roleplaying the cot death of a helpless infant. “Did Otae-chan entrap you? Did she? You can tell me, Gin-san, you can tell me everything, you can tell me _anything_ , I don’t care how filthy or disgusting or depraved it might be – because I accept you _as you are_ , Gin-san – my heart’s as open to you as my legs, I accept you as the cold-hearted sadistic brute you _are_ —”

Tae seizes Sacchan by the back of her disgusting red leather collar and attempts to pull her loose, but Sacchan clings all the tighter. Tae pulls harder. Sacchan buries her face in Gintoki’s shoulder and wails so long and loud and shrill that one of the empty champagne glasses on the table explodes in sympathy. “Bunny-chan,” says Tae. “ _Bunny-chan_ ,” she says again, and digs her fingers beneath the collar and twists so viciously tight that Sacchan loses all access to oxygen. 

The silence is as abrupt as it is welcome. 

“These are _my_ customers,” Tae tells her, “and they came here for an evening of witty conversation and massively overpriced champagne and my delightful company, not to fend off the disgusting advances of some trashy little nymphomaniac. And,” vengeance rising in her heart, “since _you’re_ in violation of every last one of our policies against sexual harassment, Bunny-chan, and since _I’m_ the head of security here, I’m afraid I’ve really got no choice at all but to evict you from—” 

But the sentence of Sacchan’s execution, or at least eviction, although preferably both at once, is never completed – gossip spreads through Snack Smile with the same viral, supersonic speeds as urinary infections spread through Yoshiwara, and news has already hit the back office: their boss comes bursting out into the club in a wheezing, red-faced panic to put a stop to anything that might threaten the financial security of his precious little Bunny-chan. 

Tae evicts Gintoki and his accomplices instead. She ushers them into a darkened back alley and takes their wallets before she lets them go, but the contents of their wallets are pathetic: a small collection of novelty Shounen Jump sticker strips dating back at least a decade, a photo of Elizabeth snipped carefully from a Shinsengumi press release, a piece of strawberry chewing gum, some rusted cogs, and three hundred yen between them. 

Hasegawa’s wallet is a piece of empty newspaper folded down to wallet size. The sight of it is so pathetic that Tae can’t even bring herself to touch it; she just knocks his hand aside. It falls to the ground, lands in an oily puddle, and begins to dissolve. 

Behind his sunglasses, his expression is as crushed as though he’s recently been mistaken for pavement by a steamroller. Distantly, Tae feels as though that’s her cue to say something so vicious it’ll finish him off – but her heart’s not in it. There’s a time and a place for free-range viciousness, and this isn’t it. 

_This_ is the time and the place for laser-focused viciousness, deliberate and targeted, committed with a goal in sight. 

She turns away without a word and goes back inside. 

The lights are bright, the music is loud, the crowds are heaving. Buried in the deepest darkest recesses of Tae’s mind, something usually kept – inadequately – caged is stirring. In anyone else, perhaps it would be the lizard brain; but the sorts of things lurking in the deepest darkest recesses of Tae’s mind bear about as much resemblance as to a lizard as someone pointing their finger and shouting _bang!_ bears to a hostile Amanto skyfleet approaching with their hundreds of anti-matter beam cannons already fully primed for war. If it’s a lizard, it’s the kind that’s twelve foot long, breathes fire, and razes country villages into ashes for nothing but the hell of it. 

She goes down the steps into the main room of the club and it feels like descending into a swamp filled entirely with perfume and sweat and old alcohol and tobacco. Bunny-chan’s booth is already busy. It’s always busy. 

 

+++

 

The weekend passes. Possibly in celebration, Sacchan suspends herself from the ceiling in obscenely convoluted fashion and nearly brings down the club’s best chandelier with all her squirming. Tae scrambles up onto the back of the booth seat and rips the thick suspension ropes apart bare-handed; Sacchan crashes down, still squirming, but now it’s because half a dozen glass bottles have shattered beneath her weight and she’s stuck rolling in the sharp-edged debris. 

Tae grabs the end of the rope and drags her from her booth, through the club, across the carpet, and out into the backroom. There, she rolls her over with her foot and proceeds to shred the rest of the ropes, bare-handed, into frayed and useless scraps of string. “You have to have respect for club property, Bunny-chan,” she explains as she does. Her voice is coming short, strained breathless, though it’s from anger rather than exertion. “You don’t own this place, so you can’t treat it as though you do. My little brother knew that when he was three years old – though that’s hardly fair of me; I suppose mentally you’ve never progressed far beyond that point, have you?”

“Talk about maturity all you want, Otae-san, we both know I’m _far_ more of a woman than you’ll ever be,” says Sacchan, tossing her head to the side as though it’ll do anything but make her hair flop limply, pathetically, on the floor. Still half-trussed up, she looks like nothing so much as a freshly-caught fish left to thrash around uselessly on the dockside until it asphyxiates. 

A freshly-caught fish is outranking Tae in profits every single night. A freshly-caught fish is stealing Tae’s rightful position at the top of everything. 

A huge and violent loathing surges up inside her. The freshly-caught fish’s arms are still held back with a particularly large knot between her shoulderblades. Tae straightens up, plants one foot on the back of Sacchan’s neck, and braces herself to pull. 

Too late, Sacchan realises what’s happening. “Careful! _Careful_ —!”

Tae has no interest in being careful. She yanks with all her strength and the knot bursts apart. The huge and violent loathing roils over inside her but doesn’t disappear; the office door is closed, but the leaderboard within is vivid in her imagination. 

Sacchan’s yell of pain turns to a yell of outrage. “Did you break it? Otae-san! Did you _break my rope_?” She shoves Tae away and scrambles to her feet, red-faced with fury and probably with oxygen deprivation too. “Would it have been _so hard_ for you to undo the knots? You think rope of this quality comes cheap? Ten metres of this stuff costs more than your pathetic little dojo makes in a year!”

“Then it’s lucky you’re making so much money, isn’t it?” says Tae. “Bunny-chan, aren’t you satisfied yet? You’ve had your fun; you’ve had your little game. Aren’t you ready to crawl back to where you came from yet?”

“I _told_ you why I’m here,” says Sacchan. She attempts to drop her voice, but her inability to speak in anything but the most attention-grabbing volume possible at all times is so deep-seated that her whisper lasts barely beyond the first two words before soaring back into a yell: “I _told_ you what I’m doing here! Games? You think I’m playing _games_? I don’t play games, Otae-san! Games are for little girls, with their pigtails and their hopscotch and their very first beginners’ safety-locked handcuff set, and I’m no girl – I’m a _woman_ , and women _work_ for a living—”

“Oh, shut up,” Tae says viciously.

“—and _however_ far I have to debase myself in the process and _whoever_ I have to grovel before in the process and _whatever_ items I have to plunge into any of my bodily orifices in the process, I am _doing – my – job_—”

“I said _shut up_ ,” says Tae, and punches her in the stomach. From the wall at Sacchan’s back, there’s an unfortunate splintering sound. “I shouldn’t have cut you down at all, should I? I should have left you there. I should have let you bring down that chandelier, and then its cost would have been deducted from your profits and I could have humbly suggested to our manager that you be sold into thankless servitude to some yakuza brute for the remainder of your miserable, melodramatic life just to pay it off... But I suppose there’s no use living with regrets, is there?”

Sacchan says nothing. Sacchan has fallen to her knees, doubled over and clutching at her stomach, wheezing for breath and not getting any. 

Tae likes the silence; she could do without the wheezing. She looks down at her for a moment, any trace of an expression entirely gone; and then she kicks the debris of the ropes to the side of the corridor, so that none of the other girls risk tripping over it, and she goes into the office and shuts the door behind her, and says, “Bunny-chan’s bringing this club into disrepute.” 

“And you’re bringing this club into financial ruin,” says her boss, extracting his toothpick from between his teeth and examining it. “I’ll say it again, Otae-chan – _one_ more incident of major structural damage, and I’ll start taking it from your profits. Not even Bunny-chan’s earning enough to cover the costs of new furniture every night, or new roof beams every night, or new front doors every night, or new adjoining walls every night, or—”

“If the clientele Bunny-chan’s attracting weren’t so motivated by the dirty little toothpicks swinging in the breeze between their legs, then perhaps we’d have fewer security problems.” Honey straight from the hive has nothing on the sweetness of her voice. “And perhaps I’d have to take less drastic measures to evict them.” 

Her boss looks at her. It’s a suspicious look, and then it becomes a knowing look, and he jams his own dirty toothpick back where it belongs and says, “Otae-chan, listen. You’re jealous. I get it. But you can’t blame her for bringing something to this club we’ve been sorely lacking before now.”

“Sexually transmitted infections?” says Tae. 

“ _Sex appeal_ ,” says her boss. “I get that you’re jealous. That’s fine. I like it when you’re jealous, you work harder. But Bunny-chan’s a great girl, and she’s doing a great job, and I’ll start caring about what she’s doing to our reputation when I stop caring about what she’s doing to our profits. You got it?”

“Certainly,” says Tae, and offers him her blandest, most amiable smile. “Thank you for your time, boss. You’re always so kind to me.”

She’s almost at the door before he calls her back. “Listen – just so you know, Otae-chan, it makes men uncomfortable when you look at them like that. _Some_ men. Not me, obviously. But... _some_ men. When you smile at them like that. Just so you know.”

“Does it really? That’s such a shame,” says Tae. “I’m so lucky to have you to teach me, boss.”

Sacchan’s where she left her, wheezing less and sulking more. “ _Bitch_ ,” she wheezes, and glowers up at Tae. 

As serenely calm as the water of the city docks on a still, windless morning, Tae chooses not to hear it. It’s quite clear that no one else will support her in the removal of Sacchan; it’s quite clear that it’s all up to Tae. “Could you come through to the dressing room for a minute, Bunny-chan? I’d like to talk, if you wouldn’t mind. Girl-to-girl. Ah – I’m sorry, do you need a hand standing up...?” 

Sacchan slaps her hand away. Tae chooses not to mind that, either. Somewhere in her generous heart she’s found a place of endless calm, and unshakable focus, and absolute crystal clarity; and she allows Sacchan to stagger back to her feet alone, and holds the dressing room door for her, and slides it closed behind her too; and she gets straight to the point. 

“Our customers are used to a certain level of classiness here, Bunny-chan; and a certain level of dignity, and sophistication, and basic self-respect. So I’m not surprised you’re doing well,” Tae says politely. “You’ve got none of that. You’re nothing but novelty value.”

“At least novelty value’s _got_ value,” says Sacchan, and jabs her finger into Tae’s face. “What have you got, Otae-san? The strength of a wild gorilla? The looks of a wild gorilla? The personality and voice and thick, luxurious body hair of a wild gorilla? Listen, if you want _my_ advice—”

“Not at all,” says Tae, more politely still, “you’ve got nothing to teach me I couldn’t learn from half an hour of watching a female pig rooting through the mud for turnips, and at least that sort of sow wouldn’t try to speak to me. But you’re very kind to offer, Bunny-chan.”

“—just a _little_ bit of advice,” Sacchan presses on, all control over the volume of her voice already lost, soaring up and wild with spite, “just girl-to-girl, Otae-san, _just_ how you like it, then given how little of worth or interest you’ve got to offer any man misguided enough to look twice at that underwhelming body of yours you’d be _far_ better off disposing with the flimsy charade of virtue and falling back on sex appeal instead – and who knows, Otae-san! If you start focusing on sex appeal now, then perhaps in twenty years you might actually have _developed_ some!”

Tae revises her earlier opinion: even the water of the city docks on a still, windless morning couldn’t hope to be as serenely calm as Tae. “Are you quite done, Bunny-chan?” 

“ _You’re_ the one who’s done,” says Sacchan. “I’m only here till my undercover work’s finished, but I’ve still crushed you. I’ve ruined you. I’ve _destroyed_ you—”

“You don’t know the first thing about destroying people,” says Tae. She’s really very calm. It’s almost miraculous how calm she is. Shinpachi would never believe it if he could see how calm she is; she’ll have to get Sacchan to report back to him, assuming Sacchan ever awakens from the state of bloodied unconsciousness Tae intends to leave her in. 

She strikes. Sacchan’s breath leaves her at exactly the same time as her utterly unfounded arrogance leaves her. 

Her reflexes don’t seem as fast as usual, so perhaps she’s still stiff from the ropes, or perhaps she’s simply not yet used to the vast quantities of alcohol that any self-respecting cabaret girl should be able to drink without flinching on a nightly basis; either way, Sacchan’s too slow to block the first strike, and the second knocks her too off balance to block the third. The fourth she blocks, though, and from one instant to the next Tae’s no longer the only one on the offensive. 

Someone’s foot goes through a mirror. Tae’s far too relaxed to care. The taste of iron at the back of her throat could be adrenalin or blood or both, but she couldn’t be calmer. Her hair has slid free of its ponytail, or perhaps been wrenched free of its ponytail; the free-standing clothing rail across the back wall comes down with a mighty metallic clattering and cloth of all colours spills out across the floor, which only makes it harder for Sacchan to keep her footing when Tae kicks it out from under her. Someone’s head slams against the floor. It could be Tae’s, but really she’s far too calm to keep track of such things. 

To call it a fight would be to do no justice to how serene and rational she’s feeling; it’s truthfully more of a discussion than anything. A discussion with fists. A discussion in which it’s necessary to kick off one wooden sandal so she can snatch it up and hit it again and again across the back of Sacchan’s head in order to prevent Sacchan from dislocating her shoulder mid-discussion. Screaming is just another form of self-expression. Either another mirror shatters or a window shatters, but it’s nothing to worry about. So calm is Tae that the red haze across her vision hardly troubles her. 

“This is _exactly_ what’s wrong with you,” says Sacchan, in the brief moment just after Tae’s sandal splinters in half and just before Tae kicks off her other one to replace it, “this is _exactly_ the kind of inhuman savagery that means you’ll never enjoy my level of phenomenal popularity, Otae-san – _no one_ wants to share a drink with a wild animal, _no one_ wants to spend their evening with a slavering bloodthirsty monster in slavering bloodthirsty monster’s clothing—”

“They did until _you_ came here,” says Tae, and slams her elbow back into whatever part of Sacchan has the misfortune to be behind her elbow. From this angle she can’t see where it lands, but Sacchan yells and it hardly matters: pain is pain, justice is justice, vengeance is vengeance. “Better inhuman than sub-human, Bunny-chan – better a wild animal than _you_ —”

The sound of fabric tearing lasts a long, long moment. At first she assumes it’s from the railing of clothes spilled out slithering around them, and then she assumes it’s Sacchan’s shamelessly flimsy nurse’s costume, and then she realises it’s the collar of her own thin under-kimono. 

She can’t get to her feet because Sacchan is clinging to her leg as though keeping her trapped down there on the floor with her means the difference between life and death, which for Sacchan it most likely does, but Tae scrabbles to sit up in the slithering pile of fallen clothes and does her best to bring Sacchan’s life to an extremely overdue end anyway. 

“Jealousy flatters _no one_ , Otae-san,” yells Sacchan, in between attempting to use Tae’s own knee as a shield, “though of course I can’t speak from experience because my own countless assets and talents and virtues mean I’ve never had cause to be jealous of anyone a day in my life, except for whatever undeserving lucky bitch once nursed a newborn Gin-san at her breast and tenderly mopped the milky drool from his infant mouth afterwards; but jealousy makes an ugly woman uglier, everyone knows that, and in terms of looks you’re so far behind me to begin with that you _really_ shouldn’t take the risk—”

“You think I’m jealous?” says Tae. She kicks harder, trying to detach Sacchan from her leg like she’d try to scrape a dog turd from her sandal. “You think I’m jealous of _you_? You think you’ve got anything _anyone_ would want? You haven’t made contact with reality since your last flashback arc – and when was _that_ , Sarutobi-san?”

Behind her glasses – hanging crooked from one ear – Sacchan’s expression darkens with a scowl. 

Victory blasts its trumpets in Tae’s heart. She presses the advantage. “And remind me, how many flashback arcs have you had? Overall? Round it up if you don’t remember, I know it can be easy to lose count. Oh – but that’s right!” says Tae, viciously triumphant, “I almost forgot! _I’m_ the second female lead – and _you’re_ nothing but a mediocre back-up stalker for when Kondou-san’s too busy for screentime who couldn’t break the top twenty if she tried—”

“Who’s number one _here_?” Sacchan demands. 

Victory stops blasting its trumpets in Tae’s heart. In their silence she hears that the war drums never stopped; her blood is pounding as hard and loud as an army marching into battle. 

“ _Exactly_ ,” says Sacchan, scrambling to sit up, “which only goes to show that once the voting demographic of our character poll is reduced to drunken middle-aged salarymen whose wives are no longer interested in their receding hairlines and increasing waistlines and dirty little top secret sadomasochistic urges, and once Tsukki’s taken out the picture, and once you’re too busy obsessing over me to provide any real competition for me, then I’m _far and away_ the most popular female character in the series; which is exactly what I’ve been saying all along, if you’d ever done yourself the favour of listening to me instead of sneering like the concept of ‘electrifyingly raw sex appeal’ is _far_ too far beneath you to bother getting down and dirty with it—”

Tae lunges forward and grabs her by the baby-pink collar of her nurse’s uniform and at least in the most technical sense it _is_ a kiss: there’s mouth-to-mouth contact. Since Sacchan’s still talking, there’s tongue-to-tongue contact that tastes of nothing but champagne. Since she’d really rather Sacchan stopped talking, preferably on a permanent lifelong basis, there’s teeth-to-tongue contact—

There’s a scream. There’s blood. Tae’s heart is leading a stampede inside her, all the way down. She’s quite sure she’s never been less attracted to anyone in her entire life, but when it comes to screaming and blood, she’s _well_ within her comfort zone. 

“Uptight – hypocritical – _bitch_ ,” proclaims Sacchan, and spits blood, and looks up at her with the same kind of crazed, vindictive triumph as the city’s UFO believers had had when the first of the Amanto invasion forces were sighted through the telescopes – so what if something terrible is coming? At least she’ll get to say _I told you so_ , assuming she survives it... “Finally getting desperate, are you? Desperate enough to listen to me? Desperate enough to learn a few lessons from your only very very very _slightly_ elder but extremely better? Desperate enough to sink all the way down to _my_ profoundly erotic level?” 

“I’d need specialist scuba-diving equipment to sink as far as that,” Tae tells her, her voice raised to drown out the ferocity of her own heartbeat, but she’s preoccupied assessing the distance between where she’s pinning Sacchan and the nearest wickedly sharp shard of shattered mirror. Usually, people look a little less feverish with anticipation once the screaming and the blood get started. She’s sure she can remedy that. 

“Well, I suppose if you’re _that_ desperate for my wisdom, I can afford to share a couple of tips,” allows Sacchan, radiating smugness even flat on her back with Tae’s fist still clenched in her collar. “Just a little taster. A sample of what you’re missing, Otae-san. A—” 

Tae jerks her fist upwards. It’s not a punch, but it slams Sacchan’s mouth closed. Something creaks inside her jaw; Sacchan bites her own tongue this time. “If all you wanted was a violent, miserable death, there were far, _far_ better ways to get it than challenging me on my own turf, Sarutobi-san. But I’m happy to oblige. I am _very_ happy to oblige.”

“Of course you are,” says Sacchan. She’s breathing so hard Tae can feel it, the sharp rise and fall beneath her, blindingly self-satisfied. “Oh, of _course_ you are. You try to pretend this isn’t who you really are but _I’ve_ always seen the truth, Otae-san, _I’ve_ always known you for a hideous brutish cuckoo in an unsuspecting nest—”

She jerks her head to the side just in time: her glasses shatter, but the wreckage isn’t driven down into her eyes the way Tae really would have preferred. It’s unfortunate. But it’s fine. There’ll be another chance. With her hand in a fist, there’s always another chance. 

“—but I can tell you,” Sacchan ploughs on, entirely unfazed, “that just because I’m a masochist, that doesn’t mean I’m _indiscriminate_. That doesn’t mean I’ve got no standards. That doesn’t mean I just get turned on by any old kick in the shin. No, it’s got to be a _good_ kick in the shin – a high quality kick in the shin, from a brutal and extensively practised sadist who knows _exactly_ what they’re doing due to either years of sexy, rigorous training or to a simple natural instinct, a natural _talent_ , an innate gift for sadism that comes into this world only once a generation – that rarest of all creatures, the _natural-born sadist_ —”

Tae presses her arm across Sacchan’s throat and leans down with all her weight. “There’s a building site near my house,” she says, directly into her ear. “After work I’m going to take you there. I’ll open up the cement vat and put you inside, and I’ll watch until you drown. And then I’ll go home.” 

Sacchan’s eyes flutter closed from either bliss or asphyxiation – it’s hard to tell. Either way, she’s enjoying herself. She wheezes a breath and prepares to waste the last of her oxygen supply. “You could... tie me up first. To—”

“No one will find your body,” Tae tells her flatly. “No one will wonder where you’ve gone. No one will care.”

“That way I won’t be... able to, to... fight back. When you beat me violently into unconsciousness. When you... when you, you... when—” her breath comes back to her all at once, because if there’s anything Tae knows for certain that she doesn’t want, it’s Sacchan enjoying herself, “—when you kick me while I’m down,” she concludes, all in a rush, and yanks Tae back down to her level with a terrible squirming urgency that would probably be unnerving if Tae weren’t still too full of fury to recognise anything except her fury. 

It’s one thing to witness Sacchan’s incredible speed at turning a situation utterly obscene from an outsider’s perspective, the way that every single resident of Edo who’s ever had the misfortune to cross her path has certainly had to. It’s quite another to be so intimately involved with it. Every fastening on her hideously tacky nurse’s costume seems to spring undone all at once; with an uncanny wriggling agility she manoeuvres – what? how? – and only when Tae twists away to knee her in the stomach does she realise that somehow, moments ago, without ever even touching it, Sacchan’s pulled loose the complicated bow holding her obi securely closed. 

With her obi loose, her kimono is looser. With her kimono looser, she’s got the freedom to knee Sacchan in the stomach _really hard_. 

Behind her, something shatters. Tae ignores it. 

“ _Just_ like a cuckoo in the nest,” proclaims Sacchan, when she’s done yowling about it, “except the cuckoo is a savage soulless monster and the nest is all the other innocent humans in the world with no idea what kind of abomination walks among them; that’s you, Otae-san, a hideous monstrous cuckoo _masquerading_ as something that shouldn’t have been killed at birth to save all the rest of us from your—”

“Shut your mouth or I’ll knock your teeth out,” says Tae, who’s foregoing her usual interest in artful politeness for an interest in not wasting her valuable time on maintaining the pretence. 

Something else shatters. Tae ignores that, too.

Sacchan’s radiating smugness so strongly it’s nauseating. 

And then something creaks, like metal straining under pressure – and then something thuds, like metal dropping onto stone – and then there’s a rush of cool air that lifts her loose hair from her neck and cascades it, fluttering, across her shoulder – and a man’s voice says in gruff bewilderment, “What the hell’s going on in here?”

There’s a moment of terrible stillness. 

Tae looks up. 

From the gaping hole in the wall where until two minutes ago there had been a window, a team of would-be thieves looks down. 

After that, several things happen in very quick succession. 

Sacchan disentangles herself. She does it with such unnerving speed that Tae lands flat on her back in the pile of spilled satin, and neither the black-clad man frozen in the act of scrambling through the removed window nor his black-clad companions peering in behind him have time to react to the second thing: which is Sacchan arming herself, incomprehensibly fast, with two sheaves of kunai that Tae would really rather not know where she’d been keeping hidden. The third thing is Sacchan leaping for the window, which she does with a burst of ninja acceleration that turns her into a mostly flesh-coloured blur. The man in the window is bowled backwards into the alleyway outside; his companions scatter around him, and Sacchan gives chase, and within seconds the darkness has swallowed them all. 

Distantly, somewhere out there in the Kabukichou night, someone is screaming. More than just someone. Definitely a few people. And, so far away it’s like the rattle of pebbles in a well, there’s the peculiar, distinctive sound of a hailstorm of kunai ringing against rooftiles. 

Tae sits up – carefully, so as not to damage her pride. With the windows ripped out, the noise from the streets has lost what little muffling it ever had. Music from the surrounding clubs pounds energetically through the dressing room. Every raucous drunken cry is clear as a bell. 

Most of Sacchan’s nurse’s uniform is on the floor. She looks at it for a moment, and then she balls it up, judges the distance, and throws it out the window. 

From the shattered wreckage of the mirror, she finds the biggest shard and props it against the wall. She re-wraps her kimono, she re-ties her obi, she checks her reflection. She roots through the mess until she finds a hairbrush; she untangles her hair, and she re-ties her hair, and she checks her reflection. She opens the cupboard beneath the sink for the bottle of emergency champagne the girls keep there, and lacking a corkscrew she smashes the neck open against the dressing table, and lacking the ability to erase her own memories without alcoholic assistance, she drinks half of it. 

She checks her reflection. She drinks the other half. And then, the empty bottle tossed out the window too, Tae goes back to work. 

 

+++

 

The bust of the Magamo thieves’ ring that night is sensational news. The months of robberies, the months of break-ins, the months of red-light customers and employees alike afraid to walk alone for fear of knife-point mugging – eventually all of it will continue, of course, but it’ll be at least a month or so before another gang works up its nerve enough to make a claim on Kabukichou turf, and by then Tae and her own cabaret army will be ready for them. 

With the Shinsengumi swarming over the district, business everywhere is slow. Snack Smile spends a few nights discreetly closed. 

When it reopens, there’s no sign of Bunny-chan. At her booth is Kumi, back in her old spot, looking suntanned as she shows off her holiday photos to anyone who’ll listen. On the leaderboard there’s not even a space for Bunny-chan’s name. Queueing at the club’s golden double doors as they open, the waiter says something to a busy crowd of sweaty-palmed, shifty-eyed men that makes all of them leave at once in disappointment.

 _Almost_ all of them, anyway. “Otae-chan!” cries the waiter, and Tae’s newest customer – sweaty-palmed, shifty-eyed – comes to join her at her booth. 

“I didn’t actually want to see you,” he confides. It’s not his first mistake. Being born was his first mistake. Everything he’s ever done since then has just been adding to the running total. “But the waiter wouldn’t let me ask for the girl I really want. Could I see Bunny-chan?” 

“Bunny-chan?” says Tae. She pretends to think about it. “Never heard of her. Sounds trashy. Why don’t you leave and never come back?”

“Bunny-chan with the purple hair,” her customer persists, “ _that_ Bunny-chan – she told me I could find out if her colour was natural if I paid double for—”

“I think you should leave,” says Tae, “and _never come back_.”

Bunny-chan is gone. She’s gone so thoroughly that it’s like she was never even there to start with. In fact, it’s much better for everyone if she was never even there to start with. The only version of reality Tae intends to accept as fact from now on is the version in which _Bunny-chan was never even there to start with_. 

She’ll get last week’s sales records from her manager’s desk. She’ll burn them. She’ll erase her from history. If history is written by the victors, then logically Tae must be the victor. She’ll evict any customer who dares to speak her name. The truth is what she wants it to be, and the truth is what she makes it, and starting right now the truth is that Bunny-chan was never, ever, _ever_ here at all.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> [I'm [over here on tumblr](http://www.suitablyskippy.tumblr.com/), most of the time just rhapsodising about all varieties and/or combinations of Diamond Perfume, as per usual. Thanks for reading, and any comments would be appreciated! ♥]


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